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We've improved Slashdot's video section; now you can view our video interviews, product close-ups and site visits with all the usual Slashdot options to comment, share, etc. No more walled garden! It's a work in progress -- we hope you'll check it out (Learn more about the recent updates).

moogla (118134) writes "Apparently Dice.com could not make Slashdot work they way they wanted to; with a murky plan to tap into the Slashdot-reader community to somehow drive attention or insight into other Dice Holdings properities, they've burned through

$7.2 million of intangible assets and $6.3 million of goodwill related to Slashdot Media

and have only started to realize some improvement on related sites. With ad revenue declining and not expected to pick up (read: everyone who uses Slashdot uses adblocking softwarwe), it appears that the Slashdot stewardship experiment by Dice Holdings has been a financial failure.
Since the site has been redesigned in a user-hostile fashion with a very generic styling, this reader surmises Dice Holdings is looking to transform or transfer the brand into a generic Web 3.0 technology property. The name may be more valuable than the user community (since we drive no revenue nor particularly use Dice.com's services)."Link to Original Source

Slashdot Media was acquired to provide content and services that are important to technology professionals in their everyday work lives and to leverage that reach into the global technology community benefiting user engagement on the Dice.com site. The expected benefits have started to be realized at Dice.com. However, advertising revenue has declined over the past year and there is no improvement expected in the future financial performance of Slashdot Media's underlying advertising business. Therefore, $7.2 million of intangible assets and $6.3 million of goodwill related to Slashdot Media were reduced to zero.

So they feel they need to change something. Fine, make a change and try to appeal to another demographic and drive more traffic, but do so without driving away what you've already got.

I'd like to believe the revamp was a last-ditch effort to salvage the brand; but it seems to be just that only, not an attempt to improve anything. I'd be more optimistic the site redesign didn't seem so aimless and generic. I think a key takeaway is that because there's no value to added traffic (that just increases cost and isn't really doing anything for Dice) unless they can _do something_ with the community that generates them money, the only thing they can do is either bring in non-computer savvy individuals (ad impressions) or job seekers, and to do that they need to dilute the site heavily. Or re-position it.
Or get rid of the community and sell the brand to someone who wants it for a less trendy Gawker or something, i dunno. That's how I see it.